The origin of Krita can be traced to Matthias Ettrich’s at the 1998 Linux Kongress. Matthias wanted to show the ease with which it was possible to hack a Qt GUI around an existing application, and the application he choose to demo it with was GIMP. His patch was never published, but did cause problems with the GIMP community at the time.

At the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Koch. The basic idea back then was to make KImageShop a GUI shell around ImageMagick. It was going to be a corba-based application with out-of-process filter plugins, compatible with GIMP plugins, which are also out-of-process, though of course not corba-based.

The name KImageShop fell foul of trademark law in Germany, and KImageShop was renamed to Krayon, which also appeared to impinge on an existing trademark, so Krayon was finally renamed to Krita in 2002.

Initial development was slow, but picked up strongly from 2003, resulting in the first public release with KOffice 1.4 in 2004. In 2005, Krita gained support for CMYK, Lab, YCbCr, XYZ color models and high bit depth channels, as well as OpenGL support.

From 2004 to 2009, Krita was strongly focusing on being a generic image manipulation/painting application in the style of Photoshop or GIMP. Since 2009, the focus is squarely on painting: the Krita community aims to make Krita the best painting application for cartoonists, illustrators, and concept artists.

From 2009 onwards, the Krita project started funding community members to work on Krita by way of student jobs, in addition to development funded through Google Summer of Code. This experiment has resulted in a huge jump in stability and performance.